I woke up this morning about 4:30 AM after a solid six and a half hours of sleep. That is, officially, my normal sleep rhythm. It is also a place I haven't visited in quite a while. That was one way that I could tell the work stress was starting to release, as I started to return to my normal sleeping pattern. In my normal sleeping pattern I tend to go to sleep about 10:00 PM and wake about 4:30 AM. It varies a little in each direction, depending on what is going on over all, but that is the general pattern.
I love the hour or so before sunrise. It is the perfect time for a morning walk through a sleeping city neighborhood. It is a great time for a leisurely breakfast, for morning reading and writing. It is a very quiet time, which I can fill however I choose to fill it. This morning, it was with a big bowl of oatmeal, a cup of coffee, some toast, and padding around the house in my jeans as I touched up my shirt with an iron.
I am sitting in the living room as I write this, with the sliding glass doors to the balcony wide open. The sky is just starting its turn from the black of night to the varied blues of the morning. It is crisp outside, cool, but not cold.
I had a cascade of dream fragments last night, with no central narrative. I recall only something about reading a piece of paper with gold letters, and a woman in a white kimono style robe with gold lettering on the robe. There was a crispness in the dream, a sense of well defined edges, and the scent of cleanliness - soap, fresh laundered clothes. I suspect the root of the dream was mostly ordinary - I did laundry last night (and so was tucked away in fresh linens), and though not directly drawn from the book I am reading, the images of paper and the woman in the white robe were consistent with some of the visuals drawn by J.R. Ward.
I've logged onto my work email account and I can see there was minimal traffic overnight. A small technical problem that we have some available time to overcome, a followup to an ongoing item, and other than that, the incidental email that flows through a company network pretty much around the clock. Official communications, status reports, simple questions, scheduled job notifications. It is a welcome relief from the heat of the project when I would log on in the morning and find myself with a hundred plus email stacked up, each screaming with the urgent voices of flying monkeys.
Though I walked back into a bit of a buzz saw on Tuesday, after my four days off, it is a simple buzz saw, something that can be overcome with time and resources. It slammed my stress meter pretty high, but it was a fast peak of stress, sort of like bumping something you had injured - I reacted because it was sensitive, not because the bump was that hard.
Well, I am reaching the bottom of the cup of coffee, the oatmeal is all gone, the birds are singing and the sky is a pale shade of blue. I am going to pop over to my favorite chat room, say good morning to folks, and then head on in to the office. I hope you have a great day. It was nice spending a little time this morning with you, whoever you are.
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